when you don't have a song, a structure, or an idea. you can just play the lick a bunch of times

oof i am cutting it CLOSE this week!

i wish i had more time to refine this but... this was primarily an experiment. so that's fine. this is an elody electric recorder, and honestly when i started this whole thing i was thinking, i hope that i will get to the point of actually playing and recording this thing again. i hadn't played in 8 years! so... we did it!

i do plan on doing some actual tunes but for now. this is just improvised noodling, randomised drums, and a layer of gross beat for good measure. maybe it will still be a fun listen. i had fun making it at least!

i plan for this to be be my last month of weekly music for this year, so i've got some break time. but, i will be filling in the two weeks that i missed, and i will be back in 2026 for the full 52 weekly beats!

this was truly a speedrun any%. 2 hours total after a busy and exhausting week. it's ROUGH... but i'm still glad i checked in. i have a skeleton of something that i might eventually refine, so that's better than nothing!

mind your volume for that first like 10 seconds. lmao. look at the midi below

i always wanted to try my hand at black midi... this is an extremely gentle foray into that because i hadn't made anything until today 🤡 2 hour effort lmao

there are 1861 notes so like this is pretty weak by black midi standards LMAO. it's really more 'play the right chords but on every octave at once' than true black midi

i used the exact same set of instruments as the track i transcribed this week (except for vocals) and just tried to see how i could make something different from the same components. i totally shifted genre, which wasn't my initial intention but made perfect sense to me. 5 hours is seeming to be the sweet spot in terms of getting enough detail that it is interesting to me and worth the effort, but it's also very achievable in a week. i guess if you factor in transcription time, there was probably about 5 hours of extra preparation time.

i had so much fun writing this!!! i massively struggled to write something of a similar genre last year, so this is pretty huge for me. i am definitely stretching the definitions of 'chamber prog' - the string ensemble is more cinematic/orchestral. but i would say despite that and despite it being inevitably a little rough around the edges given the timescale... i'm pretty happy with it all in all 👍

this is called déjà vu because i have a really bad memory for freer flowing jazz music so i very earnestly have no idea if i have accidentally ripped someone else off with these hooks. i wrote it on midi sax/brass then realised i cannot be BOTHERED to tweak all of the articulations to make them sound real. so then i just used a bunch of synth presets instead.

it's been a rough one, and again no headphones. so. noodling on the piano time

i have been having some ear problems which is literally the worst thing for a weekly music challenge!! so, this week i just wanted to write/arrange some stuff and not worry too much about sound design or mixing since i couldn't wear headphones for long. here is an extremely midi arrangement of a little melody i have had in my head for a while. now i can set it free. lol

i had the uncharacteristic urge to make a 12-bar blues this week... and so this is it, plus some extra bits. i wanted something with a sort of late 90s/early 2000s game soundtrack vibe, racing hovercars in the trash future.

my next big project is a concept album. i had the idea that each 'character' should probably have their own sonic palette, which would be effectively in conversation throughout the album. one such 'character' is... The Machine. and so this week i thought i would sketch out roughly the sorts of sounds i could imagine for it. this track will not wind up ON the album, but if i polished it up a little, these sorts of 'sketch' tracks might be a fun EP, i don't know.

like last week, i wound up just improvising all of the parts (sometimes on half speed... every note was played by hand rather than arpeggiated, i wanted total control!), then splicing together the decent bits into something more coherent. this worked out well for the machine because like a generative AI, it never does quite the same thing twice. i would probably consider a more focused composition process for the other 2 main characters.

i also added some old movie samples from various sample packs. given the genre i was working in, it just felt incomplete without them. rest in peace, the days of being able to just record your movie samples by hand from home and mostly get away with it. those sounded like fun times.

sadly i started super late (saturday!!) so had barely any time to spend on this. it's certainly not polished. i didn't have time to mix the drums except as a single drum bus (i need to make a project template that will split my battery channels for me. it's getting silly how many times i regret not doing that.). but this challenge is definitely helping me get faster. my first track took 8 hours for 2 minutes of music, vs this one taking 6 hours for 5 minutes.

some good old fashioned printercore. a low effort entry comprised of some improv on a sliced up breakbeat and some keys. the vast majority of the parts are actually sliced up parts of a single improv (per part) in new orders and rhythms. i didnt even have access to headphones for most of it... but that's all good! it's nice to just sketch with what i have available and let it be imperfect.

i don't feel like i had a lot of time or inspiration to do much this week, but i wanted to play around with beepmap which is fl studio's image-to-sound synthesizer. it was a lot of fun to make some real chaotic stuff! if i had more time it would be nice to refine this some more, but alas, that's not how the week went.

also i guess my circle of 5ths plan was aborted by my last track... so we are gonna be in Eb all month.

RPM is over and i made an EP!!! yay!!! :D (https://dantealexander.bandcamp.com/album/house-for-broken-dolls)

i humbly submit this track i technically started last week but finished this week. which was for RPM. i learnt a lot! it was super fun! i will definitely do it again next year. this is the track i feel reflects a lot of what i was trying to do at the beginning of the month, but didn't quite know how yet.

it does have swearing in it again. sorry lol

we are probably back to very simple instrumentals for a while i am so tired :')

this is more or less a stopgap for record production month. an introductory track to my album that also happens to be in G (very loosely)... because, well. january's tracks were all in D. so i guess we are going backwards around the circle of fifths.

the text is from the long-term nuclear waste warning message suggested by sandia national laboratories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages

i found the geiger counter on battery. so that felt very appropriate to play with.

Please consider listening with headphones as there is some swearing in the lyrics. As previously, I would be happy to replace with a clean version if required by the moderators or site admins.

This one is super close to the edge on the weekly deadline. I actually started making an entirely different track at the start of the week, became frustrated with the process of the sound design for that track... recorded demo vocals for this one on an impulse since I had just finished writing them. Those are still the vocals in the track because I had no time to rerecord with my proper setup. I had originally hoped to do some kind of... screamed vocals which I could not hope to sing in the middle of the night on a school night.

SO MUCH tweaking I wish I could do, if not for the terms of the challenge. But for now, I'm pretty happy with the overall vibe, even if it's rough around the edges.

Though this is a song about chronic insomnia and the general (gestures vaguely) of the world right now, this has truly been a helpful challenge in allowing me to channel my sleepless nights into better things. :)

for record production month, i'm doing a house EP, because i wanted to do something with some restrictions, like... 'okay it's going to be 120bpm, you can only use 4 on the floor drums, and you should be able to dance to it'. i am not being very strict on the definition of 'house'. i know my stuff is gonna wind up being noisy and weird anyway, but it's the idea of starting from a stronger and simpler, more restricted foundation to give me the opportunity to rein it in a little.

i started this song and i was pretty excited! i downloaded one of those band in the box style phone apps to help me with writing a good chord sequence and having a sense of how it would sound in the arrangement, which helped massively in separating out the compositional and production process. i arranged the main parts, thinking. okay. this is good. i like it. but it is not Dante yet. it needs more STUFF. so then i did my usual nonsense on it and now it is like this.

i dont think any DAW file has made my computer take off like a jet engine than this one. i'm usually super lazy with my automations but this one absolutely needed it because of the amount of competing elements to juggle. but i'm excited, because the fact i am thinking about juggling them and not just attempting to shove them into one giant, inedible sandwich was exactly why i needed to do this.

i spent my entire weekend on this and it might legitimately be my favourite thing i've ever made. i may come to regret saying this once the listening fatigue wears off.

I would personally wear headphones to listen to this one, due to the lyrical content (referencing the torture scene from casino royale). If the mods or site owners have an issue with the lyrics I will make a clean edit but I promise the edit, too, will be memey.

Outside of this streak this week, I have been working on a cover of a Louis Cole song. However, trying to figure out good and NEW chord voicings (as opposed to just copying his voicings note for note) was hell. So I decided to use my weekly beat to practice jazz chord voicings so I may suffer less next time I want to learn a jazzy song. As a result, this week is more an exercise than a song, just some disjointed phrases. I did put it to lyrics though, with a vocal synthesiser. this was mainly just to motivate me to actually finish it, by having something kind of jokey and silly in my score while i was working on it, but i think it also did direct the chords and voicings somewhat. so that was pretty fun!

I think alternating between simpler pieces with busier arrangements and smaller but more planned compositions is working quite well in terms of allowing me to practice both and not get burnt out on either, but I won't hold myself to a rigid schedule with this.

This has truly been a creative wellspring of a challenge and it has been a joy to tune into everyone's tracks every week. Even if I only make these four pieces, I am now on track to compose more music this year than ever in my life. Thank you :)

i wrote two things this week, which were both intended for this challenge. this one was the easiest to finish, so i went with it - it came out of finding a cool set of chords while writing my first idea and wanting to expand on it, and the rest came very naturally.

there is more polish i would want to do with more time, but i decided to leave it there so i had a chance of finishing my second track too, in the same week (i was hoping the second song would count for week 1, which i never completed cause i didn't realise the challenge started on january 1st 😂)

(ALSO: i never noticed but all three tracks so far start in the key of D. should i just keep writing songs in D for this challenge??? lmao)

i had a bad health week, which led me down the path of... writing an experimental choral piece about it. i wrote it as a 3-part harmony and then adlibbed some soprano bits as well. i honestly was not expecting to use voice AT ALL in this challenge, so that was i guess a pleasant surprise.

the fun part of writing super crunchy harmonies is that... i felt a lot less self-conscious about my voice. the less fun part is that i still had to sing those damn harmonies.

hello! first weekly song ever! ah! uploaded in a rush, for i must go on a trip tomorrow. (in fact immediately after posting i noticed the tail was SO long but i was in such a rush to upload that i forgot to save the audio file i edited. so. there is like a minute of silence at the end. but let's just call that part of the track :))

I have been mainlining DJMAX Respect V for like... the past month. I love the 90s/2000s tracks from earlier games that just sound SO obnoxious and of their time. I have no idea what subgenre this is other than "cheesy as all hell". But I had a ton of fun making it.

Future weeks will probably not be this dense or complicated... but then again, I like dense and complicated :D